Long thought gone forever, a Cape Cod lighthouse that once overlooked Wellfleet Harbor was recently rediscovered almost 3,000 miles away on a rocky Californian cliff.

"The story has always been that that little 30-foot lighthouse in Wellfleet was taken down and destroyed," said Jim Walker, chairman of the Cape Cod Chapter of the American Lighthouse Foundation. "Here we are 80 some odd years later and it's been discovered. I think it's fantastic that it's not lost and gone."

The fate of the 30-foot-tall, cast-iron tower that stood at Mayo's Beach until 1925 was uncovered late last year by lighthouse researchers digitally archiving historic photographs.

Colleen MacNeney, whose parents, Bob and Sandra Shanklin have photographed every lighthouse in the United States, reported the find in this month's edition of Lighthouse Digest.

"This is the most exciting thing that I've found," MacNeney said in a telephone interview from Florida yesterday.

The lighthouse's existence was an equally pleasant surprise to local experts and people familiar with it.

"I thought that the government took it down," said Joni Malcynsky, whose family has owned the Mayo's Beach lighthouse keeper's house since 2004. "That is definitely news to us."

The keeper's house stands in its original location on Kendrick Avenue much as it did when the tower was removed more than 80 years ago. Out back, a building that once held kerosene for the lighthouse is a draw for artists, who paint it from the beach, Malcynsky said.

The lighthouse has at least one other distinction: It was the first to have a female lighthouse keeper, Malcynsky said. That was Sarah Atwood, who served from 1876 to 1891, following in the job of her late husband, William.

The Wellfleet light's discovery on Point Montara, just south of San Francisco along the Pacific coast, was a genuine shock, said Wellfleet historian Helen Purcell. "In a way, I don't know if I ever asked myself what did they do with it."

Some of the confusion surrounding its fate may come from the existence of several lighthouses at different times in the same area, Purcell said. The lighthouse now in California was first erected in Wellfleet in 1881 and was the last one to be built in the harbor area.

It was believed to have been razed in 1939, according to MacNeney. There is no known documentation of any move across the country.

But during research work for a book about lighthouses, MacNeney and her parents found a photograph of a lighthouse tower in Yerba Buena, Calif., dated 1928 with the inscription: "This tower formerly used at Mayo Beach, 2d District."

The inconsistent dates and the mysterious reference to "Mayo Beach" led MacNeney to Washington, D.C., where, after an extensive search of the National Archives, she discovered correspondence that proved the lighthouse had been moved from Wellfleet to Yerba Buena and eventually to Point Montara in 1928, she said.

"It was transferred from excess stock from one Coast Guard district to another," she said.

The tower was first built in a foundry in Chelsea, north of Boston, said Walker, from the lighthouse foundation. It could easily have been taken apart bolt by bolt and moved by rail in pieces, he said.

But the reason the Coast Guard would undertake such a seemingly expensive action is unclear, Shanklin said. "This has to be furthest a lighthouse has been moved in the U.S."

Whatever the circumstances of its move, the tower is back in use.

The U.S. Coast Guard continues to operate the now-white tower as an aid to navigation, Coast Guard assistant historian Scott Price said.

The management was unaware that the lighthouse came from Cape Cod and thought it had been built new in Califonia, said Brian Wentzlaff, an assistant at the hostel. Now, the hostel staff will have to consider changes to their historical materials, Wentzlaff said.

The Coast Guard will also have to make some changes. An initial search of its summary of lighthouses showed that the Mayo's Beach lighthouse had been destroyed, Price said. "We have it down as being razed," he said. "We need to fix that, then."